Altruism, empathy, and sex offender treatment.

Abstract

Treatment programs for serious offenders such as sex offenders typically include an empathy training component as part of a comprehensive intervention package. The reasons for doing so are partly based on research evidence indicating that social disconnection and relationship ruptures related to empathy failures often trigger offending, and also because it is hard for people to grasp how individuals can inflict severe harm on others without lacking empathic capacities. In this paper we examine Philip Kitcher’s concept of psychological altruism and altruism failure and consider its conceptual relationship to empathy and morality. We then apply Kitcher’s multidimensional concept of altruism to the field of sex offender rehabilitation and argue that it can provide a useful ethical resource through which to approach the various tasks of practice.